Josh on NV40 & R420
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Some of us still appreciate your work, regardless of how fallible your soft human brain can be. There's Truform in UT2kN? News to me.
Performance impact? :|demalion said:
Re: Transistors
One possibility to 175 vs. 210 million transistor question may be redunant circuitry? Not sure if that's the proper term - please correct me if I'm wrong.
I know in desktop microprocessors there is reduntant cache circuitry to increase yields, in case some of the cache circuits don't come out right. In fact I believe AMD has upwards to 20% circuit redundancy on its cache for its Athlon XP Processors, in order to maintain higher yields.
I believe IBM only bills its clients on the number of successful yields. Perhaps the 175 transistor NV40s come from IBM, and the the 210s are from TSMC, which bills its clients on the total number of wafers. There's an obvious insentive to include more (if any) redundant circuitry with a TSMC part.
How does this crazy theory sound?
One possibility to 175 vs. 210 million transistor question may be redunant circuitry? Not sure if that's the proper term - please correct me if I'm wrong.
I know in desktop microprocessors there is reduntant cache circuitry to increase yields, in case some of the cache circuits don't come out right. In fact I believe AMD has upwards to 20% circuit redundancy on its cache for its Athlon XP Processors, in order to maintain higher yields.
I believe IBM only bills its clients on the number of successful yields. Perhaps the 175 transistor NV40s come from IBM, and the the 210s are from TSMC, which bills its clients on the total number of wafers. There's an obvious insentive to include more (if any) redundant circuitry with a TSMC part.
How does this crazy theory sound?
nobie said:
Truform = NPatch = In Direct3D
Humus said:
Also there is N-patch TRUFORM in Morrowind, but I guess it depends on what you mean by 'recent'.
Like surround gaming on the Parhelia, it's great, but not a common commodity asked for by many.
However both have their potential, and I'd love to see them advanced even if it's only for the benifit of a few of us initially.
Doesn't everything start out that way? Hit, Miss, then come back once they find just the right app to showcase it?
N-patches aren't going to come back. They're an inflexible HOS technique and are prone to significant graphical artifacts. Hopefully we'll see a programmable primitive processor soon that will allow tessellation in or before the vertex processor, or at least a more interesting HOS technique than N-patches.
What's more, they're slow on the R3xx.
What's more, they're slow on the R3xx.
I don't remember anything starting out that way off the top of my head. Typically once a technology comes around, if it's not adopted pretty much right away, it falls by the wayside.
What game? What resolution/FSAA/AF settings? From what framerate to what framerate?jvd said:
Regardless, the R3xx's truform implementation is much more CPU-hungry than it was with the R2xx.
Also, another big strike against truform is parallax mapping (or holographic texture mapping, or whatever you want to call it). Basically, since N-patches are transparent to the developer, they would break parallax mapping. Since this technique is sure to be used in most games coming out in the near future, I don't see any reason for N-patches support.
Chalnoth said:
Well despite your lack of awareness of them, there have been many. The most appropriate would be DirectX which didn't have a stellar start now did it? Now it dominates. Actually that would describe alot of MS' endevours as would the opposite.
Tech's past is littered with failed attempts that later went on to be successes, just as there are early great overwhelming successes that have burned out (Glide?).
Usually people see the promise in something and then it gets perfected. The biggest barriers are licensing the technology to people who can make it work and finding and exploit THE killer app for it.
Surround gaming on the Parhelia may not have legs for Matrox's line, but if SurroundView survives with ATI perhaps it will get a rebirth., especially with the drop in LCD prices
I'm not saying they will be adopted, they might not be, but the ideas are nice, especially if they can be done with minimal performance hits.
I don't need another shader effect (as fun as they are initially) or silly pop-up clocker in my drivers/hardware, but I would like to see more support for these two features.
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